Desert Easter

Frequently, when I was a child, school holidays in the spring overlapped with Easter.  Our family's response to the free week was to take off for the desert, joining my godparents at some pre-arranged meeting place - usually some small dusty park in some small dusty town.  We'd eat chicken sandwiches with mayonnaise at a splintery picnic table while my father and my godfather laid the maps out on the hood of the Jeep or the the Scout, running their fingers over the lines of contours and tracks.

Some years this week coincided with the blossoming of desert plants: chollas with their delicate, green-tinted petals, yellow burrobrush and creosote, the orange desert mallow, prickly pears flowers in astonishing pink, sturdy ocotillos blooming like torches... My dad was always on the look-out for cactus a-welter in blooms, and I remember one year he found a prickly pear that had seven in a row, all open at once.

The weather was usually sunny, but windy and cold, especially at dawn and dusk.  Specks of mica and sand in clothes, hair and our food were common; at night you could sometimes hear them skirling along the tarp we laid out on the ground, along with the rustling of the wind along the tarp's edges.  On especially cold nights the dog pressed close, curled into a tight ball of black and white hair.

Come morning, we grew to consciousness hearing the metalic pumping of my father priming the Coleman stove, then the snap/whump of the flame.  Some mornings it was the smell of eggs and bacon that drew us, hair askew and shivering in the shadows, from our warm sleeping bags.  Others it was the promise of blueberry pancakes, richly purple with the juice from the can.  My brother and I would huddle around the resurrected campfire of the night before, watching the flames transparent in the rising light as my godparents checked the water boiling for coffee.  As a child I took all this for granted; now I appreciate the effort my parents and godparents made, rising in the dawn chill to provide food and warmth.

If the morning was Easter, there would be plastic eggs hidden around camp.  Yellow and purple, blue and green and pink, they would be tucked under chollas and creosote, perched near the mouths of rodents' dens and balanced in the crotches of juniper trees.  (We were old enough to know to watch out for snakes.)  We usually had baskets to put them in, full of translucent plastic grass in astonishing shades of green.  One year I remember, we were given small stuffed rabbits as well; that was also the year I lost one of my favorite toys amid a hillside of boulders, as I was so delighted with my new toy that I failed to notice when the old fell out of my pocket.  Somewhere, on a rocky hillside, a small plastic cat is dissolving into dust and memory.

There are many stories of hermits seeking holiness in the desert; equally many tales of American travelers being transformed by the rigors and astonishments of the arid Southwest.  But here is where the transformation works deep in the bone: in the memories of children smelling bacon on the cold winds of morning and hunting plastic eggs among stickers and sand.

Comments

[jo(e)]

I love your description -- such wonderful details!

[bats :[]

My best Easter was on a herpetology field trip when I was in college, pretty much in the middle of nowhere (well, somewhere outside of Parker AZ, where the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts meet...Reptile City!). Nice to be alone on the side of a hill, watching the sun rise on Sunday morning.
Then back to work, trying to outwit chuckwallas and avoid rattlesnakes...

[Rana]

jo(e) - thanks!

bats :[ (love your pseudonym, btw) - those desert sunrises can be spectacular, can't they? There's something about the quality of the air, early in the morning, that I just love.

[arvind]

Nothing like childhood memories! Which, of course, could be as easily used for evil the way fast food chains do. I'm glad your parents exposed you to the environment that made you the wonderful person that you are!

[Rana]

Yeah, I'm grateful too. I only hope that someday I can do half as good a job as they did. :)

[BillW]

Very nice! I had a good childhood, but I'm jealous of one spent that close to the desert!

[Rana]

It wasn't all that close! We lived in California for most of my childhood, so there was at least a day's drive involved.

(It's trips like these - and the resulting photographs - that had me puzzled for a long time about why so many people hate slide shows and family road trips. I always did - and still do - like 'em.)

[Liz]

Wonderful story. I'm from the Pacific Northwest but have been to Arizona a few times this year to visit my son at Prescott College. I've loved seeing the desert plants and animals, like the Horned Lizard I wrote about on my blog (see link below)/ Your descriptions of plastic easter eggs under the cactus made me laugh.

Liz - Carnival of the Arid - Horned Lizard

[Bob]

Hi Rana,
Reading your post took me back to a time when we took my son out to Anza Borrego and hid a bunch of eggs around camp. :-)

Kaiel on an Easter Egg hunt

Now that he is a 16 year old he rarely wants to do things with his parents, but at least we have those memories. :)

[Bob]

Shoot,
sorry my link got messed up on that last post :-(
This one should work.

http://www.anzaborrego.net/travel/AnzaBorrego/photoalbums/EasterInToroteCyn.aspx

[Rana]

I'll go fix it - no worries.

Yeah, my brother also went through that stage (I did too, but in other arenas), but he'll come back around, if our own experiences are anything to go by. I now love doing things with my parents!

[Rana]

Torote Canyon is one of my favorite places in Anza Borrego, btw; I used to go out there for Thanksgiving with my "virtual" cousins (family friends who are family de facto if not de jure). Turkey smoked with rosemary in a Weber grill is great!